How many souls are searching for some outer thing that can make them spiritual: dogmas, phenomena, experiments, anything but the exploring of the self! Willing to become confused, ready to be puzzled, happy with the riddles of life, contented to go into the dark caves in order to find something! Man never values plain words, he always wants subtlety. He is pleased with something he cannot understand and thinks that it must therefore be mysticism. If one realized that spiritual development depends upon the awakening of the false ego to its true existence, its own reality, how simple the way to spiritual perfection would become! Is it not true that we make our own difficulties? Where one step is needed we would like to go a hundred steps. It is for this that the Hindus asked simple worshippers not to go directly into the temple, but to go around it a hundred times before entering, so that they felt that they had walked sufficiently to be entitled to go in.
Such is the picture of human nature. The path of the mystic is the quickest path for the very reason that he takes the path of simplicity, that he tells the truth in plain words. And yet is it really as simple as it appears to be? The beauty is that in the simplicity of the mystic there is the greatest subtlety; sometimes a thing which looks all too gross may in the end prove to be most fine.
Belief in God helps one to annihilate one's false ego; but in order to believe in God the seeker must first believe in the one who believes in God, in whom he places his confidence, in other words in his teacher. If one cannot fully believe in one's teacher one can never believe in God. That is the first step in learning to believe, and the second step is believing in the ideal. It is not necessary for the ideal to exist on earth in the form of a human being; this ideal may be in one's heart, in one's mind. And thirdly one comes to believe in God, and in that belief one loses oneself, so that God covers the believer and all there is. In this way one arrives at the perfect realization of the true ego, which is the pursuit of the mystic.
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